What She Wanted
by ThinkingCAPSLOCK
Summary: And then there were two.


_**AN: **Also on tumblr, written for a prompt by eightfoldwordplay_

Droplets fall to the floor one by one, drip-drop, drip-drop, an endless, torturous tone to the ears of the onlooker. Drip-drop, drip-drop.

Karkat presses his hand to his mouth and, in one swift movement, sweeps his arm across his face, smearing the candy red across his lips and down his chin. Fuck. The metallic tang makes his nose buzz and the scent travels through his airway, coming to a burning rest somewhere in the center of his throat. He chokes, and he carries on.

_I'M COMING FOR YOU._

The darkness is closing in around him, though, and it's all he can do to push past it, to keep from suffocating in its endless depths. He feels the worn floor beneath his sneakers, slipping slightly in the pooling cherry as he goes, with just enough traction on the smooth rock to keep mostly upright. He's willing enough to carry on, but his body seems to have other plans. His knees knock together like a one-sweep wriggler entering its first strife and his arms are jellied noodles at his sides. He grinds his teeth together noisily, gritting them against the faint sting at the back of his head that hisses _failure, failure _with every step. He impolitely tells the voice to _SHUT THE FUCK UP_, but it doesn't listen. It never does.

How did it turn out like this?

Karkat stumbles and falls forward, his claws scratching pale gouges into the stony walls and screeching into the dark. A thousand curses set in a thousand phrases splutter through his broken pan as he pushes his scratched and sore palms against the floor, struggling to stand.

There's no way out.

This whole venture is a lost cause. He's a failure as both a friend and as a leader. All he can do is seek vengeance. And for what? He can't even answer that. He doesn't know why he's doing it anymore, except that it's a reason, and that if he has a reason he can keep doing things. He's tired and cold and his head throbs with every beat of his bloodpusher, but the pain keeps him awake and his wakefulness keeps him going. His unbridled fury keeps him going.

Then, he sees it. Piercing through the inky black are the faintest rays of light which, when pursued, begin to give way to broader beams that illuminate the hall and bounce off of pungeant puddles of red.

"Serket!" Karkat calls, his voice grating to his own ears. It's no prepubescent shriek of frustration, but the full-fledged growl of an adult. Under other cirucmstances, he'd be proud; now, he is only worn past his point and praying for an end.

"Hello, Karkles."

Karkat snarls at the name and his sickles reach his hands before he realizes he's called for them. His claws thread around the handles tightly, the cold metal digging tight into his palm, but he can barely feel the pain for want of his goal. She's so close he can _feel_ the high-pitched vibrations of her fluttering wings, the hot breath of her throat and the unwavering ogle of her vision eightfold. If he wasn't so furious, he might have been scared. But he's not. He's determined. God-tier or not, she's going down.

"Have you come to finish me off?"

Reaching the apex of the hall, Karkat barely recognizes the tired voice. This is no Vriska Serket, at least not as he knows her-full of life and full of fight. No, this isn't the Serket he knows. This is someone else's Serket.

His chapped lips part in what he thinks will be his last smile. Maybe some of her luck rubbed off on him in their last-though not their final-strife. After all, if she's not the Serket he knows-well, all the easier to dispatch her. No friend, no foul.

"You're late as always," she drawls. "What a lame-ass leader. You should have let me be the one in charge, the one pulling the strings. Then it wouldn't have had to end like this, would it?" A pause. "Then she wouldn't have had to die."

"Shut the FUCK UP," Karkat snaps back, his mind stuck in white static and unable to bring forth the slew of superb insults from his careful reserve. This just earns him a hoarse laugh, eight beats long, true to form.

He rounds the corner and the light is magnified with every step. Cobalt specks turn to puddles and degrade to murky purple splotches as he passes them by. She's hurt. His grin stretches wider, feeling false on his face, an empty mirror of persons past. Every glistening nubby tooth shows, or at least that's what it feels like, and he pictures himself terrifying and tall in the passage, as monstrous as he is powerful. In reality, he's hunched and bleeding, but the mental image fortifies him and he thumps a fist against the rickety wooden door, letting it swing it open with a satisfying whine of protest.

Ah, here lies Vriska Serket in none of her former glory. He would laugh if he wasn't so painfully aware of their reflecting circumstance. She seems to think the same but, unlike him, she does laugh, a harsh bark against a blue-lipped sideways grin. There's nothing she can't laugh at, even now. She'll always be in control. Always.

Serket doesn't even move to stand as he approaches. She sits on the floor, back against the desk, orange tunic dyed deep blue across the front and sides, smearing cobalt across the floor. Her wings flutter uselessly at her sides, crinkled and losing scales that glitter in the flickering lantern light.

"How'd you even find this place?" he asks, as though he hasn't come to act on behalf of the troll angel of death. She laughs her cold laugh again and gestures awkwardly with a stiff wrist, sending drops of cerulean across the floor.

"A good gamblignant always knows where to stow away when the time is right," she says. "I guess I failed, too, then-clearly, the time is not right. In fact, it is very wrong!" And then she laughs, but it isn't her own, it's a fascimile of a laugh that once was but was silenced forever at her hand-an accented _hehehe_, loud and punctuated and enough to bring Karkat to one overwhelmed knee.

"Oh, Karkles. You didn't have to kneel just for me," she says, lips twisted in a cruel smirk. "Though I do deserve it."

"You deserve fucking _nothing_," Karkat spits, and flecks of red splatter across her face. She doesn't even flinch, though her vision eightfold seems to spin before his eyes. The world swims and he can't tell if it's her influence or his own pan's betrayal.

"I had to do it," she says. "She was in the way."

"Of what? Of your perfect game?"

"It had to end like this."

"Yeah? Tell me, master manipulator, how the fuck did your cracked little nookstain on the collective crotch of trollocity of a pan figure that one out?"

"The pathways called it," Serket says simply. "I was simply a facilitator in the grande scheme of things. Not my style, but it was a favour for a friend. We were in cahoots." She drags the last word out, eight vowels, perfect timing. It infuriates him past his point of no return and he can barely order the words of his reply.

"Don't you fucking _dare_ tell me she told you to do it." Karkat's voice is a broken wreck of highs and lows, louds and softs, so many conflicting feelings forced into one sentence that he's shocked it's even coherent. "Don't you fucking-"

"You don't need to believe me," Serket interjects with a shrug and a wince. "I really don't care. I did what I came to do. I saved this fucking shitpile of a game, no thanks to you."

"You saved-_everyone is dead_!"

Serket reaches out and, with a practiced flick of her claws, bounces a fluorite octate off of Karkat's skull. He cusses and makes a grab for her skinny wrist but despite the injuries, she's still as lithe as a whiskery fangbeast.

"You're not, are you?" she replies. "And I'm not. Not yet, anyway." She laughs again.

"In what goddamn ass-backwards hellhole of a trash planet universe is that _winning_?"

"You're an idiot and an imbecile if I've ever seen one," she whispers through her pointed grin. "And I ain't going to explain myself to you."

"Yeah, well, you'd better." Karkat says. This time it's his turn to show off and the blade-end of the sickle is at her throat before she can say another word. "You can't pull the strings if you're dead, can you, spiderbreath?"

"You'd be surprised." She tries to laugh once more but it comes out as a cough and cobalt blood dribbles from her parted lips.

"Tell me," Karkat insists, pressing the blade closer with practiced restraint, though it's hard. One stroke and it'd be all over. A little pressure and then, _shhhhk_, done. A thin line of cobalt bubbles against the metal, just enough to make a point but not enough to maim. No, there'd be enough time for that later. First, he wants goddamn _answers_. Death is patient.

"We're in a broken game, dumbass," she says, rolling her eyes in an unsurprising display of dramaticism despite her situation. "_No one_ was supposed to live. Doomed fucking universe, buddy."

"What the fuck is that supposed to-"

"Do you _still_ not get it? Do I have to fucking spell it out for you?" Serket knocks the sickle from his hand and it clatters to the floor, forgotten in his heavy confusion. "She died because she wanted you to live. Both of us! How the fuck did you survive so long on your own, Jegus Christ? You're hopeless!"

"Don't tell me that she wanted this. Don't tell me that she-"

"Fine," says Serket. "I won't."

A frustrated tremor runs across Karkat's shoulders and down his back, but his mind is already fuzzy and he's losing his chance. He has to kill her. He has to. He has to take his...his...

"If you conk out on me, I swear to gog, I will end you. I don't care what she wanted. There is only so much of your stupid nubby shit that I can put up with."

Serket's voice brings Karkat's consciousness back to the surface and he glares at her. She's pulled her knees to her chest now and she's watching him almost curiously, an amused smirk playing across the painted blue. God, she looks so disgusting, covered in dark, sticky blood, dark bruises beneath her skin and...and...

Oh.

Oh, shit.

Oh, shit, no. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck-

"Living with you is gonna be _real_ fun," she says, giving those obscene oculars another roll.

"I'm not going to be living with you," Karkat growls, his chest rising and falling with laboured breaths that he is absolutely positive have nothing to do with the blackness he feels in his bloodpusher. "Because you're going to-"

"Die?" she laughs. "Go ahead. Kill me." She grins fiercely, a bit of the old spark back in her azure eyes, and-

When did her eyes start to change? He could have sworn they were grey the last time they fought, when he had cracked her ribs left her to die. Or left to die. He was a little foggy on the details now.

"Think you can do it, pupa?" she snarls, the excitement seeping into her voice, giving it back its forgotten life. "Think you can kill me? Go ahead. Try." She tips her head, exposing just enough of that slender neck for the perfect cut, the perfect kill, the perfect-

Before Karkat knows what he's doing, he's sunk his fangs into her flesh and they're rolling across the floor, kicking and punching and biting and making out in a messy pile of sloppy, spinning feels and it's never going to end because his hate is so fresh and deep and powerful that it's nigh limitless and his mind is set on fight _and_ fuck.

Shit. Maybe he could make it work.

It was what she wanted, after all.


End file.
